THE LYCAN KINGS SILENT MATE

Chapter 2

Eva didn't have time to scream.

Alistair moved faster than the thing coming for her throat, faster than anything that size had a right to move — one hand still locked around her wrist, the other snapping out to close around the scout's jaw mid-air. Bone crunched. The creature's lunge became a shriek became a wet, ugly silence as Alistair drove it into the nearest bookshelf hard enough to splinter the wood, hard enough that a hardcover history of the Ottoman Empire slid off the top shelf and hit the floor beside Eva's foot with a sound far too calm for the room it landed in.

"Stay behind me," Alistair said, and it wasn't a request.

"I don't take orders from strangers who kidnap—"

"I haven't kidnapped you yet." His voice had dropped into something guttural, something that vibrated in her chest instead of her ears. "Give me a reason to skip that step and just let them have you."

The second scout came in low, aiming for his ribs, and Eva watched — because some horrified, fascinated part of her couldn't look away — as Alistair caught its wrist and simply broke the momentum, redirecting all that inhuman speed into the third shelf of romance paperbacks, which toppled in a landslide of pastel covers and heaving bodies. He fought like he didn't need to think about it. Like violence was a language he'd been fluent in since before he could walk, and every movement cost him nothing because he'd already decided, a long time ago, that he would always win.

It should have terrified her more than it did.

The third scout circled wide, keeping Eva in its sightline, and she understood with a cold drop in her stomach that it wasn't trying to get past Alistair at all. It was trying to get to her.

"Alistair—"

"I see it." He didn't look away from the two he was already fighting, which made no sense, should have been impossible, and yet he caught the third one's approach anyway, some sense beyond sight tracking every body in the room at once. "Eva. When I say run, you run for the back door and you do not stop, do you understand me?"

"And leave you to fight three of—"

"Four." He said it almost conversationally, right before the shop's back door exploded off its hinges and a fourth shape came through it, bigger than the others, moving with a kind of unhurried arrogance that made Eva's skin crawl worse than the golden-eyed hunger of the first three combined.

"Damon didn't send scouts to retrieve her," the newcomer said, stepping over the wreckage of the poetry section like it personally offended him. Tall, pale, dressed like he'd wandered out of a boardroom instead of a bloodbath. "He sent scouts to confirm what she is. I'm here to make sure the King doesn't leave with her."

"Marcus." Alistair's voice went very, very quiet, which Eva was beginning to understand was far more dangerous than shouting. "You're a long way from court."

"So are you, Your Majesty. Skulking around a human bookshop like a lovesick pup." Marcus's gold eyes slid to Eva, and his smile widened, slow and delighted, like he'd just solved a puzzle he'd been given weeks to crack. "Oh. Oh, that's rich. The rumors were true. The great cold King of the North finally found his mate — and she's a psychic little shopgirl who can't even touch her own reflection without seeing how the mirror shatters."

"Get out of my shop," Eva said, and hated how thin her voice sounded.

"She talks." Marcus's grin didn't dim. "Alistair, truly, my condolences. Imagine loving someone who flinches from your hand." He tilted his head, considering her the way a butcher considers a cut of meat. "Tell me, little seer — when you looked at him, what did you see? How does the great King die?"

"I didn't see anything," Eva snapped before she could stop herself. "That's the point. That's the whole point, you overdressed leech—"

Alistair's hand found the small of her back, one fast, silencing pressure, and even through the fear, Eva felt it land like something far more deliberate than a warning — warm, possessive, unmistakably his, a touch that promised things neither of them had time to name yet. She understood the message even without words: don't give him more than he already has.

Too late. Something shifted in Marcus's expression — calculation sharpening into genuine, delighted alarm. "She's silent to him." He said it slowly, tasting the shape of it. "Her gift doesn't touch him at all. Damon is going to want to hear that in person." His gaze cut to the three scouts still picking themselves up out of the wreckage. "Take her. Leave the King bleeding enough to crawl home and grieve."

"You'll want better odds than four," Alistair said, and something in his voice had changed, dropped lower, rougher, edged with a sound that didn't belong in a human throat. Eva felt the temperature of the air around him shift, felt her own pulse stutter against his palm where it still rested at her back. His shoulders were widening. His nails, when she risked a glance down, were no longer nails at all.

"You wouldn't," Marcus said, and for the first time, something like doubt crossed his face. "Not here. Not fully. You'll level the block."

"Then it's a good thing," Alistair said, "that I don't particularly care about this block."

He didn't shift all the way — Eva understood that only later, once her mind had caught up enough to process what she'd watched — but what he did do sent every scout in the shop scrambling backward, sent Marcus's smile flickering, sent the windows that were still intact rattling in their frames as something ancient and furious rolled off Alistair Vance like heat off asphalt.

"Eva." His voice, when he found hers again, was almost gentle. Almost human. "Run. Now."

She ran.

She hit the back door at a dead sprint, glass and splintered wood underfoot, cold night air slamming into her lungs, and she didn't look back — not once, not even when she heard Marcus scream something in a language that predated every language she knew, not even when the shop behind her lit up gold and violent and wrong.

She made it four blocks before a hand closed over her mouth from behind and a second, entirely different voice murmured against her ear, silk-soft and delighted.

"Hello, little seer. Prince Damon's been so looking forward to meeting you."